hPVI 2019, House edition

It’s time for the bi-annual release of hPVI, Minnesota’s Oldest And Most Beloved Legislative District Metric™.

For those unfamiliar with hPVI, it’s a partisan voting index for state legislative districts that I’ve been compiling in one form or another for over nine years.

In the first part of this post I will do some analysis of the new version, if you’re jonesing for the numbers though, the actual hPVIs can be found at the bottom of the post.

For more information on what hPVI is see the explainer (from the 2017 edition, but still relevant as an explainer). For programmatic access to the numbers see the hPVI API. There is also an hPVI LeftMN sub-site now which can be found at hpvi.left.mn.

House hPVI Histogram

Like with the Senate version, the state of play in the House has shifted further towards the DFL since the last edition of hPVI. The DFL now has more Even to D+10 districts than the GOP does, 31 to 25, in the 2017 version the GOP had 37 such districts to the DFLs 36.

Looking at the next bucket, in 2017 the DFL had 10 districts rated from D+10 to D+20, now they have 16, while the GOP went from having 31 to 32. And in 2017 the GOP had a single district R+20 or greater, now they have 5, while the DFL went from having 19 districts over D+20 to having 24 now.

Here is all of that information in a more digestible form:

Year

> R+20

R+20 – R+11

R+10 – Even

Even – D+10

D+11 – D+20

> D+20

Total GOP

Total DFL

2019

5

32

25

32

16

24

62

72

2017

1

31

37

36

10

19

69

65

* Note: 37B has a raw hPVI of 0.004, ever so slightly DFL leaning, so I’ve put it in the Even to D+10 bucket. But 0.004 is essentially zero and one could make a credible argument that 37B doesn’t really belong in any of the buckets.

As with the Senate, the DFL now has more districts it is favored in than the GOP does. In the Senate hPVI post I translated the hPVIs of the districts into rough race ratings of the Toss-up, Lean, Likely and Safe variety which I will replicate for the house version below.

Safe GOP

Likely GOP

Lean GOP

Toss-up

Lean DFL

Likely DFL

Safe DFL

37

11

10

11

12

12

40

59

11

64

Unlike the Senate edition where six of the eight Toss-up districts have GOP incumbents, in the House version eight of the 11 Toss-up districts have DFL incumbents. The reason for this disparity is that the House was up for election in 2018, a year in which the DFL won a bunch of Toss-up districts, while the Senate was not.

Those Toss-up districts are:

District

Name

Party

hPVI

3A

Rob Ecklund

DFL

EVEN

14B

Dan Wolgamott

DFL

D+2

27B

Jeanne Poppe

DFL

EVEN

33B

Kelly Morrison

DFL

EVEN

36A

Zack Stephenson

DFL

EVEN

37B

Nolan West

R

EVEN

38B

Ami Wazlawik

DFL

D+1

39B

Michelle Christensen

DFL

D+1

47B

Greg Boe

R

R+1

54B

Tony Jurgens

R

R+1

55A

Brad Tabke

DFL

EVEN

Amazingly, in the House, there are only two members who are in districts that lean to the party opposite the one they are in:

District

Name

Party

hPVI

4B

Paul Marquart

DFL

R+8

5A

John Persell

DFL

R+3

While Persell will no doubt be one of the GOPs top targets for 2020, don’t be surprised if they don’t try too hard to unseat Marquart, who defies political gravity better than any one else in the legislature.

At the same time Donald Trump was winning 4B by over 21 points, 56.7-35.1, Marquart was cruising to re-election 53.9-46.1. In 2019 Jeff Johnson won 4B by over nine points while Marquart won by almost 18 points. In both cases Marquart’s margin of victory was almost 30 points better than the DFLs top-of-the-ticket candidate.

House hPVI Table Analysis

The same broad trends in the Senate numbers are present in the House numbers as well (as would be expected). The districts outside of the metro area continued moving towards the GOP while the suburban districts surrounding the Twin Cities continued moving towards the DFL.